Teaching Ethnography
Raymond Madden, Department of Anthropology, La Trobe University
In light of the fact that ethnography is ‘diminishing and expanding, emerging in new forms in new contexts’, what should we be teaching the next generation of anthropologists (and other related social researchers) about ethnography? Is there a distinctly anthropological legacy to be maintained in the face of an emerging interest in ethnography from other disciplines? What about questions of the ‘ownership’ of ethnography in relation to the desire to proselytise to as wide an audience as possible and the value of this approach to understanding the human condition? What do we say of cyber-ethnography and the technology-mediated sociality that is increasingly part of contemporary student’s lives? Are they sites for ‘proper’ ethnography?
